The 2017 Infrastructure Report Card was recently released by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and a cursory review leaves me to wonder, who is editing this thing? Is anyone looking critically at making sure investment recommendations are worthwhile and in the public interest? Much of our nation’s infrastructure was built during the 1930s New Deal as part of a grand vision to build dams, roads and bridges. While those federal investments are credited at least with bringing the nation out of the Depression, some of those investments have caused unacceptable environmental damages, like the dams that block migrating salmon. Infrastructure today needs a new vision that focuses on building a more sustainable future, like high speed rail, functional mass transit and renewable energy. Unfortunately, the ASCE is stuck in the 20th century as it evaluates the nation’s infrastructure.

“ASCE and its members are dedicated to ensuring a sustainable future in which human society has the capacity and opportunity to maintain and improve its quality of life indefinitely, without degrading the quantity, quality or the availability of natural, economic and social resources.”

Obviously, the statement is a legitimate and encompasses many of the basic components of sustainability. However, as many growth-oriented organizations ignore, there is no consideration of what specific physical and biologic needs and how much of them are essential to “maintain and improve its quality of life indefinitely.”

The ASCE uses its Report Card to quantify how much it would cost to repair existing system or expand them, but there is no questioning of whether all of the existing infrastructure systems are actually providing public value or even have the potential of being sustainable. The overarching philosophy is to maintain these systems without looking beyond them to fundamental changes in how the systems work or don’t work in providing their intended benefit, which is not corporate profits.

This is especially true of the Inland Waterways System (IWS), which is the most subsidized commodity transport system in the U.S. and a system that has highly damaged one of the most diverse, productive and rare habitats that exists – rivers and floodplains.

There is a fundamental problem with this ASCE Report Card regarding the IWS, which is strongly based on the U.S.… Read the rest

After a century of recklessly damaging our rivers — far too often for little public benefit, one would hope that we would have learned some lessons. One of them should be that we would make it easier to restore our rivers than it is to further damage them. The committee structures intended to provide specific recommendations on river management that our lawmakers enacted, unfortunately, have produced the opposite result.

In 1986 Congress gave the barge industry special interests a committee that, by its design, can easily agree on industry-favorable recommendations for further development of barge navigation. In contrast, river restoration advocates were saddled with a conflict-ridden, oversized committee that by its design is unlikely to agree on river restoration recommendations of any significance.

Congress has the ability to create committees and boards that are tasked with providing stakeholder recommendations and guidance to government agencies to help the agencies perform their duties. This article will compare two of those entities that were created to provide recommendations and guidance to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) regarding the Corps management of our rivers.

Introduction

The Inland Waterways System (IWS) is an industrialized version of what were once America’s natural major rivers. Congress authorized and funded massive alterations of the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Kentucky, Columbia, and other major rivers to accommodate nine-foot draft barges to be pushed up and down our rivers, typically by channelizing and/or damming the rivers. There are about 12,000 official miles within the IWS, all of the natural portions severely degraded by the alterations. The map in Figure 1 below shows the rivers and coastal areas that are a part of the IWS in blue lines and the ports on the rivers in yellow dots.

Figure 1: Coastal and Inland Waterway System

Since the vast majority of commodities transported on the IWS are shipped on the Upper Mississippi River (UMR), Illinois River, Ohio River and/or Lower Mississippi River, I will limit all detailed discussions on those four rivers. Table 1 below compares barge traffic volumes, appropriations and estimated Inland Waterways Trust Fund receipts for 2014 on those segments of the IWS. This table allows us to dig deeper into the cost and use of each of these segments of the IWS so that we can better evaluate the use of taxpayer dollars and weigh the benefits to society of the IWS, the industries it serves, and the materials it transports.… Read the rest

Admit it, if you’ve ever seen it you’ve thought about being on The Daily Show. So have I. So on December 1, 2015, when I received an email from a person claiming to be from the show saying they wanted to do a field piece about questionable projects undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers, alarms immediately went off in my cynical brain and I wondered who was scamming me. After a bit of investigation, we were leaning towards this inquiry being legitimate.

1. Introduction – What we have wrought on our Midwestern rivers

Row crop agriculture has always been intricately tied to the promotion of barge navigation on our large Midwestern rivers, primarily for exporting corn, wheat and more recently soybeans. Agricultural interests were heavy promoters pushing to change our rivers into barge canals and to this day continue to lobby for expansions of the system.

Because none of our rivers are deep enough for their full lengths for the minimum nine-foot drafts required for towboats used, especially during low flow periods, engineers called for alterations on an unprecedented scale to create an adequate channel depth and width for these over-sized barges. Conveniently, the river alterations actually reinforced the connection with agriculture by easing the conversion of floodplains to cropland, in some locations creating new land that was immediately placed into agriculture.

On the Missouri River this involved constructing massive dams upstream and then shortening, straightening and narrowing the lower portion of the river to the point that it has little resemblance to the original river. About 522,000 acres of floodplain and riverine habitat were lost through the process of constructing a nine-foot channel; all of that acreage altered and much of it, as well as land along the river created by the process, became levee-protected corn and soybean fields.

Congress authorized the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) to channelize the river several times. The final iteration of this process is called the Bank Stabilization and Navigation Project began inthe early 1950s and was completed about 1981, paid for by taxpayer funding. Massive impacts to river habitats have resulted.

Much the same has occurred in the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) and Illinois River from the construction of the nine-foot channel there. In the areas north of St. Louis where the rivers are not consistently deep enough they were impounded with locks, which are low-head type dams constructed solely for navigation purposes creating pools rather than flowing rivers (See Figure 2).

The alterations constructed below St. Louis in the Mississippi River were much the same as Those built within the Missouri River. Again, the floodplains were the site of large losses of natural habitat, and remaining floodplains were turned into flattened monoculture-row crop landscapes protected from the river by levees.… Read the rest

Unexpected direct and indirect actions affected the process surrounding the approval, development and construction of a facility to replace the original Locks and Dam 26 on the Mississippi River at Alton, Illinois, which significantly altered how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned their projects after 1970. The facility that became known as the Melvin Price Locks and Dam (named after the local Congressional Representative who was involved in getting it built) was at the forefront of the transition from a Corps that had very little oversight and essentially zero public input, to an agency operating increasingly under the skeptical scrutiny of the public. The Melvin Price project was equally important in the transition away from a process that ignored the impact of large-scale projects on the environment.

Had it not been for the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 citizens would not have the rights they have today to engage in the project planning process and to gain access to government documents that allow them to fully understand why a project is being planned, how much it might really cost, who it primarily benefits, and whether there will be public benefits. Maybe most importantly, the law provided a stick that the public could use to protect the environment and counter the growing influence of special interests on the use of their taxes.… Read the rest

A huge block of concrete looms in the Mississippi River just south of Alton, Illinois. It’s the Melvin Price Locks and Dam, and its story flows like a reality TV show. The US Corps of Engineers (Corps) had plans to build the $1 billion project completely under the public’s radar; but a burning river, leaking oil platforms and toxic housing sites helped derail the rush for the big dam.

First some background on who does what on our rivers.

Since before our nation was formed, the Corps has been considered by many as the premier waterways organization in North America. It started by surveying and mapping our rivers, then clearing the rivers of tree snags for steamboats, and finally by constructing navigation dams and locks to accommodate much larger steel barges.

The Corps does not have the sole responsibility for our rivers though. Instead, several agencies share jurisdiction for what occurs in and near our rivers. The Corps is generally responsible for river navigation on what shippers call the Inland Waterways System (IWS), flood risk reduction (a more accurate and modern term for flood control), and building and managing reservoirs (especially in the central and eastern U.S.). It also has other shared responsibilities for recreation and water supply. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been charged with protecting our rivers from pollution since its creation in December 1970. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has responsibility for maintaining and operating national fish and wildlife refuges in our rivers including the Upper Mississippi River (UMR) Fish and Wildlife Refuge, created in 1924, which stretches north 284 miles from Rock Island, IL to Lake City, MN.

Most of the 30 navigation locks and dams that make up the UMR portion of the Inland Waterways System were authorized by Congress. The Corps managed lock and dam construction during the 1930’s as a jobs program to help move the nation out of the economic woes of the Great Depression. Locks and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois, completed in 1938, was the first to contain two locks, one 600-foot long and the other 300-foot long. See our webpage here for additional information on the Corps and their work on our rivers.

Expansion of Locks and Dam 26

Because of increased barge traffic, by the mid-1950’s the upper Mississippi barge industry was asking the Corps to construct a 1,200-foot lock at the dam at Alton.… Read the rest